Spider taxonomy of the day: the araneid Arachnura Vinson 1863. Its name means spider tail (or perhaps spider with a tail?) but scorpion tail would be more apt (Skorpiura?). This one, A. feredayi, was photographed at Hinewai Reserve in New Zealand. #spider #taxonomy#Arachno19 pic.twitter.com/dEFsd8PUHS

Asarum spp. (wild ginger - this aromatic plant was used as a subsitute for tropical ginger, though they are not closely related. These are old photos so my species GUESS is A. hartwegii (first two)/ A. marmoratum respectively, however attempting to do this retroactively is incredibly complicated so don’t quote me as A. marmoratum looks very similar to A. caudatum and they have similar range.)

Bee biologists all struggle with identifying what they catch. Its irritating that, even under a microscope, it is difficult to tell many species apart. Here is an example…but it does have a “tell."

Megachile pseudobrevis has extensive black hairs at the tip of the underside of the abdomen while M. brevis has almost entirely white hairs. There you go. This specimen from Georgia. This shot by Kamren Jefferson.

Fennec Fox Classification

If dinosaurs live today as birds, how did lizards happen? Are they dinosaurs too, but ones that kept the teeth instead of the feathers? Or did lizards come from crocodiles and other megalizards that lived in Dinosaur Times?

You should probably ask @albertonykus or @palaeofail-explained about the details, as they’re infinitely more qualified when it comes to paleontology than I am, but basically: neither. Lizards, as in these things:

were never dinosaurs, nor are they descended from dinosaurs in the first place. To put it simply, lizards are a paraphyletic group (meaning they don’t make up an entire taxonomic group, instead they’re a whole group except some members) in the clade Lepidosauria along with the snakes (in fact, some lizards are closer related to snakes than they are to other lizards) and the tuataras, while the dinosaurs, along with their descendants the birds, as well as crocodiles and a bunch of other often extinct assorted weird shit, belong in Lepidosauria’s sister clade Archosauria:

(Note that this is an extremely simplified explanation, but it gets the basic things down. Again, ask @albertonykus or @palaeofail-explained for the details, they know their evolutionary shit a lot better than I do.)

tl;dr anything called a “lizard” is not descended from dinosaurs, but it’s rather the weird scrawny evolutionary cousin of dinosaurs.